OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Proportionally Fair Makespan Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We study fair mechanisms for the classic job scheduling problem on unrelated machines with the objective of minimizing the makespan. This problem is equivalent to minimizing the egalitarian social cost in the fair division of chores. The two prevalent fairness notions in the fair division literature are envy-freeness and proportionality. Prior work has established that no envy-free mechanism can provide better than an $Ω(\log m/ \log \log m)$-approximation to the optimal makespan, where $m$ is the number of machines, even when payments to the machines are allowed. In strong contrast to this impossibility, our main result demonstrates that there exists a proportional mechanism (with payments) that achieves a $3/2$-approximation to the optimal makespan, and this ratio is tight. To prove this result, we provide a full characterization of allocation functions that can be made proportional with payments. Furthermore, we show that for instances with normalized costs, there exists a proportional mechanism that achieves the optimal makespan. We conclude with important directions for future research concerning other fairness notions, including relaxations of envy-freeness. Notably, we show that the technique leading to the impossibility result for envy-freeness does not extend to its relaxations.
Machine Learning Information Retrieval and Summarisation to Support Systematic Review on Outcomes Based Contracting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

As academic literature proliferates, traditional review methods are increasingly challenged by the sheer volume and diversity of available research. This article presents a study that aims to address these challenges by enhancing the efficiency and scope of systematic reviews in the social sciences through advanced machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) tools. In particular, we focus on automating stages within the systematic reviewing process that are time-intensive and repetitive for human annotators and which lend themselves to immediate scalability through tools such as information retrieval and summarisation guided by expert advice. The article concludes with a summary of lessons learnt regarding the integrated approach towards systematic reviews and future directions for improvement, including explainability.
Automated Soap Opera Testing Directed by LLMs and Scenario Knowledge: Feasibility, Challenges, and Road Ahead
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Exploratory testing (ET) harnesses tester's knowledge, creativity, and experience to create varying tests that uncover unexpected bugs from the end-user's perspective. Although ET has proven effective in system-level testing of interactive systems, the need for manual execution has hindered large-scale adoption. In this work, we explore the feasibility, challenges and road ahead of automated scenario-based ET (a.k.a soap opera testing). We conduct a formative study, identifying key insights for effective manual soap opera testing and challenges in automating the process. We then develop a multi-agent system leveraging LLMs and a Scenario Knowledge Graph (SKG) to automate soap opera testing. The system consists of three multi-modal agents, Planner, Player, and Detector that collaborate to execute tests and identify potential bugs. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of automated soap opera testing, but there remains a significant gap compared to manual execution, especially under-explored scenario boundaries and incorrectly identified bugs. Based on the observation, we envision road ahead for the future of automated soap opera testing, focusing on three key aspects: the synergy of neural and symbolic approaches, human-AI co-learning, and the integration of soap opera testing with broader software engineering practices. These insights aim to guide and inspire the future research.
Leveraging Graph-RAG and Prompt Engineering to Enhance LLM-Based Automated Requirement Traceability and Compliance Checks
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Ensuring that Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) align with higher-level organizational or national requirements is vital, particularly in regulated environments such as finance and aerospace. In these domains, maintaining consistency, adhering to regulatory frameworks, minimizing errors, and meeting critical expectations are essential for the reliable functioning of systems. The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) highlights their immense potential, yet there remains considerable scope for improvement in retrieving relevant information and enhancing reasoning capabilities. This study demonstrates that integrating a robust Graph-RAG framework with advanced prompt engineering techniques, such as Chain of Thought and Tree of Thought, can significantly enhance performance. Compared to baseline RAG methods and simple prompting strategies, this approach delivers more accurate and context-aware results. While this method demonstrates significant improvements in performance, it comes with challenges. It is both costly and more complex to implement across diverse contexts, requiring careful adaptation to specific scenarios. Additionally, its effectiveness heavily relies on having complete and accurate input data, which may not always be readily available, posing further limitations to its scalability and practicality.
Emotional Vietnamese Speech-Based Depression Diagnosis Using Dynamic Attention Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Major depressive disorder is a prevalent and serious mental health condition that negatively impacts your emotions, thoughts, actions, and overall perception of the world. It is complicated to determine whether a person is depressed due to the symptoms of depression not apparent. However, their voice can be one of the factor from which we can acknowledge signs of depression. People who are depressed express discomfort, sadness and they may speak slowly, trembly, and lose emotion in their voices. In this study, we proposed the Dynamic Convolutional Block Attention Module (Dynamic-CBAM) to utilized with in an Attention-GRU Network to classify the emotions by analyzing the audio signal of humans. Based on the results, we can diagnose which patients are depressed or prone to depression then so that treatment and prevention can be started as soon as possible. The research delves into the intricate computational steps involved in implementing a Attention-GRU deep learning architecture. Through experimentation, the model has achieved an impressive recognition with Unweighted Accuracy (UA) rate of 0.87 and 0.86 Weighted Accuracy (WA) rate and F1 rate of 0.87 in the VNEMOS dataset. Training code is released in https://github.com/fiyud/Emotional-Vietnamese-Speech-Based-Depression-Diagnosis-Using-Dynamic-Attention-Mechanism
ChatDyn: Language-Driven Multi-Actor Dynamics Generation in Street Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generating realistic and interactive dynamics of traffic participants according to specific instruction is critical for street scene simulation. However, there is currently a lack of a comprehensive method that generates realistic dynamics of different types of participants including vehicles and pedestrians, with different kinds of interactions between them. In this paper, we introduce ChatDyn, the first system capable of generating interactive, controllable and realistic participant dynamics in street scenes based on language instructions. To achieve precise control through complex language, ChatDyn employs a multi-LLM-agent role-playing approach, which utilizes natural language inputs to plan the trajectories and behaviors for different traffic participants. To generate realistic fine-grained dynamics based on the planning, ChatDyn designs two novel executors: the PedExecutor, a unified multi-task executor that generates realistic pedestrian dynamics under different task plannings; and the VehExecutor, a physical transition-based policy that generates physically plausible vehicle dynamics. Extensive experiments show that ChatDyn can generate realistic driving scene dynamics with multiple vehicles and pedestrians, and significantly outperforms previous methods on subtasks. Code and model will be available at https://vfishc.github.io/chatdyn.
From MLP to NeoMLP: Leveraging Self-Attention for Neural Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural fields (NeFs) have recently emerged as a state-of-the-art method for encoding spatio-temporal signals of various modalities. Despite the success of NeFs in reconstructing individual signals, their use as representations in downstream tasks, such as classification or segmentation, is hindered by the complexity of the parameter space and its underlying symmetries, in addition to the lack of powerful and scalable conditioning mechanisms. In this work, we draw inspiration from the principles of connectionism to design a new architecture based on MLPs, which we term NeoMLP. We start from an MLP, viewed as a graph, and transform it from a multi-partite graph to a complete graph of input, hidden, and output nodes, equipped with high-dimensional features. We perform message passing on this graph and employ weight-sharing via self-attention among all the nodes. NeoMLP has a built-in mechanism for conditioning through the hidden and output nodes, which function as a set of latent codes, and as such, NeoMLP can be used straightforwardly as a conditional neural field. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by fitting high-resolution signals, including multi-modal audio-visual data. Furthermore, we fit datasets of neural representations, by learning instance-specific sets of latent codes using a single backbone architecture, and then use them for downstream tasks, outperforming recent state-of-the-art methods. The source code is open-sourced at https://github.com/mkofinas/neomlp.
Euclid: Supercharging Multimodal LLMs with Synthetic High-Fidelity Visual Descriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in recent years, yet continue to struggle with low-level visual perception (LLVP) -- particularly the ability to accurately describe the geometric details of an image. This capability is crucial for applications in areas such as robotics, medical image analysis, and manufacturing. In this paper, we first introduce Geoperception, a benchmark designed to evaluate an MLLM's ability to accurately transcribe 2D geometric information from an image. Using this benchmark, we demonstrate the limitations of leading MLLMs, and then conduct a comprehensive empirical study to explore strategies for improving their performance on geometric tasks. Our findings highlight the benefits of certain model architectures, training techniques, and data strategies, including the use of high-fidelity synthetic data and multi-stage training with a data curriculum. Notably, we find that a data curriculum enables models to learn challenging geometry understanding tasks which they fail to learn from scratch. Leveraging these insights, we develop Euclid, a family of models specifically optimized for strong low-level geometric perception. Although purely trained on synthetic multimodal data, Euclid shows strong generalization ability to novel geometry shapes. For instance, Euclid outperforms the best closed-source model, Gemini-1.5-Pro, by up to 58.56% on certain Geoperception benchmark tasks and 10.65% on average across all tasks.
Security Properties for Open-Source Hardware Designs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The hardware security community relies on databases of known vulnerabilities and open-source designs to develop formal verification methods for identifying hardware security flaws. While there are plenty of open-source designs and verification tools, there is a gap in open-source properties addressing these flaws, making it difficult to reproduce prior work and slowing research. This paper aims to bridge that gap. We provide SystemVerilog Assertions for four common designs: OR1200, Hack@DAC 2018's buggy PULPissimo SoC, Hack@DAC 2019's CVA6, and Hack@DAC 2021's buggy OpenPiton SoCs. The properties are organized by design and tagged with details about the security flaws and the implicated CWE. To encourage more property reporting, we describe the methodology we use when crafting properties.
DALI: Domain Adaptive LiDAR Object Detection via Distribution-level and Instance-level Pseudo Label Denoising
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Object detection using LiDAR point clouds relies on a large amount of human-annotated samples when training the underlying detectors' deep neural networks. However, generating 3D bounding box annotation for a large-scale dataset could be costly and time-consuming. Alternatively, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables a given object detector to operate on a novel new data, with unlabeled training dataset, by transferring the knowledge learned from training labeled \textit{source domain} data to the new unlabeled \textit{target domain}. Pseudo label strategies, which involve training the 3D object detector using target-domain predicted bounding boxes from a pre-trained model, are commonly used in UDA. However, these pseudo labels often introduce noise, impacting performance. In this paper, we introduce the Domain Adaptive LIdar (DALI) object detection framework to address noise at both distribution and instance levels. Firstly, a post-training size normalization (PTSN) strategy is developed to mitigate bias in pseudo label size distribution by identifying an unbiased scale after network training. To address instance-level noise between pseudo labels and corresponding point clouds, two pseudo point clouds generation (PPCG) strategies, ray-constrained and constraint-free, are developed to generate pseudo point clouds for each instance, ensuring the consistency between pseudo labels and pseudo points during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the publicly available and popular datasets KITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes. We show that the proposed DALI framework achieves state-of-the-art results and outperforms leading approaches on most of the domain adaptation tasks. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiaohulugo/T-RO2024-DALI}{https://github.com/xiaohulugo/T-RO2024-DALI}.
Large Concept Models: Language Modeling in a Sentence Representation Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

LLMs have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence and have emerged as the de-facto tool for many tasks. The current established technology of LLMs is to process input and generate output at the token level. This is in sharp contrast to humans who operate at multiple levels of abstraction, well beyond single words, to analyze information and to generate creative content. In this paper, we present an attempt at an architecture which operates on an explicit higher-level semantic representation, which we name a concept. Concepts are language- and modality-agnostic and represent a higher level idea or action in a flow. Hence, we build a "Large Concept Model". In this study, as proof of feasibility, we assume that a concept corresponds to a sentence, and use an existing sentence embedding space, SONAR, which supports up to 200 languages in both text and speech modalities. The Large Concept Model is trained to perform autoregressive sentence prediction in an embedding space. We explore multiple approaches, namely MSE regression, variants of diffusion-based generation, and models operating in a quantized SONAR space. These explorations are performed using 1.6B parameter models and training data in the order of 1.3T tokens. We then scale one architecture to a model size of 7B parameters and training data of about 2.7T tokens. We perform an experimental evaluation on several generative tasks, namely summarization and a new task of summary expansion. Finally, we show that our model exhibits impressive zero-shot generalization performance to many languages, outperforming existing LLMs of the same size. The training code of our models is freely available.
Brain-inspired AI Agent: The Way Towards AGI
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), widely regarded as the fundamental goal of artificial intelligence, represents the realization of cognitive capabilities that enable the handling of general tasks with human-like proficiency. Researchers in brain-inspired AI seek inspiration from the operational mechanisms of the human brain, aiming to replicate its functional rules in intelligent models. Moreover, with the rapid development of large-scale models in recent years, the concept of agents has garnered increasing attention, with researchers widely recognizing it as a necessary pathway toward achieving AGI. In this article, we propose the concept of a brain-inspired AI agent and analyze how to extract relatively feasible and agent-compatible cortical region functionalities and their associated functional connectivity networks from the complex mechanisms of the human brain. Implementing these structures within an agent enables it to achieve basic cognitive intelligence akin to human capabilities. Finally, we explore the limitations and challenges for realizing brain-inspired agents and discuss their future development.
Video Repurposing from User Generated Content: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The demand for producing short-form videos for sharing on social media platforms has experienced significant growth in recent times. Despite notable advancements in the fields of video summarization and highlight detection, which can create partially usable short films from raw videos, these approaches are often domain-specific and require an in-depth understanding of real-world video content. To tackle this predicament, we propose Repurpose-10K, an extensive dataset comprising over 10,000 videos with more than 120,000 annotated clips aimed at resolving the video long-to-short task. Recognizing the inherent constraints posed by untrained human annotators, which can result in inaccurate annotations for repurposed videos, we propose a two-stage solution to obtain annotations from real-world user-generated content. Furthermore, we offer a baseline model to address this challenging task by integrating audio, visual, and caption aspects through a cross-modal fusion and alignment framework. We aspire for our work to ignite groundbreaking research in the lesser-explored realms of video repurposing.
Federated Foundation Models on Heterogeneous Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Training a general-purpose time series foundation models with robust generalization capabilities across diverse applications from scratch is still an open challenge. Efforts are primarily focused on fusing cross-domain time series datasets to extract shared subsequences as tokens for training models on Transformer architecture. However, due to significant statistical heterogeneity across domains, this cross-domain fusing approach doesn't work effectively as the same as fusing texts and images. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a novel federated learning approach to address the heterogeneity in time series foundation models training, namely FFTS. Specifically, each data-holding organization is treated as an independent client in a collaborative learning framework with federated settings, and then many client-specific local models will be trained to preserve the unique characteristics per dataset. Moreover, a new regularization mechanism will be applied to both client-side and server-side, thus to align the shared knowledge across heterogeneous datasets from different domains. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed federated learning approach. The newly learned time series foundation models achieve superior generalization capabilities on cross-domain time series analysis tasks, including forecasting, imputation, and anomaly detection.
Reasoning-Aware Query-Focused Summarization over Multi-Table Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Query-focused summarization over multi-table data is a challenging yet critical task for extracting precise and relevant information from structured data. Existing methods often rely on complex preprocessing steps and struggle to generalize across domains or handle the logical reasoning required for multi-table queries. In this paper, we propose QueryTableSummarizer++, an end-to-end generative framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) enhanced with table-aware pre-training, query-aligned fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning with feedback. Our method eliminates the need for intermediate serialization steps and directly generates query-relevant summaries. Experiments on a benchmark dataset demonstrate that QueryTableSummarizer++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of BLEU, ROUGE, and F1-score. Additional analyses highlight its scalability, generalization across domains, and robust handling of complex queries. Human evaluation further validates the superior quality and practical applicability of the generated summaries, establishing QueryTableSummarizer++ as a highly effective solution for multi-table summarization tasks.
FlexScatter: Predictive Scheduling and Adaptive Rateless Coding for Wi-Fi Backscatter Communications in Dynamic Traffic Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The potential of Wi-Fi backscatter communications systems is immense, yet challenges such as signal instability and energy constraints impose performance limits. This paper introduces FlexScatter, a Wi-Fi backscatter system using a designed scheduling strategy based on excitation prediction and rateless coding to enhance system performance. Initially, a Wi-Fi traffic prediction model is constructed by analyzing the variability of the excitation source. Then, an adaptive transmission scheduling algorithm is proposed to address the low energy consumption demands of backscatter tags, adjusting the transmission strategy according to predictive analytics and taming channel conditions. Furthermore, leveraging the benefits of low-density parity-check (LDPC) and fountain codes, a novel coding and decoding algorithm is developed, which is tailored for dynamic channel conditions. Experimental validation shows that FlexScatter reduces bit error rates (BER) by up to 30%, improves energy efficiency by 7%, and increases overall system utility by 11%, compared to conventional methods. FlexScatter's ability to balance energy consumption and communication efficiency makes it a robust solution for future IoT applications that rely on unpredictable Wi-Fi traffic.
The AI Interface: Designing for the Ideal Machine-Human Experience (Editorial)
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in daily life, designing intuitive, trustworthy, and emotionally resonant AI-human interfaces has emerged as a critical challenge. This editorial introduces a Special Issue that explores the psychology of AI experience design, focusing on how interfaces can foster seamless collaboration between humans and machines. Drawing on insights from diverse fields (healthcare, consumer technology, workplace dynamics, and cultural sector), the papers in this collection highlight the complexities of trust, transparency, and emotional sensitivity in human-AI interaction. Key themes include designing AI systems that align with user perceptions and expectations, overcoming resistance through transparency and trust, and framing AI capabilities to reduce user anxiety. By synthesizing findings from eight diverse studies, this editorial underscores the need for AI interfaces to balance efficiency with empathy, addressing both functional and emotional dimensions of user experience. Ultimately, it calls for actionable frameworks to bridge research and practice, ensuring that AI systems enhance human lives through thoughtful, human-centered design.